What can I say about the year 2020? Thank goodness we survived? Please, dear gods above, let 2021 be better? That’s all I have, really. Man, this year was rough! 

But enough about 2020. Let’s look ahead and make some plans for 2021! Here are the reading challenges that I plan on tackling for the upcoming year.

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The classic GoodReads Reading Challenge! My challenge for 2020 went through several changes (and several reading slumps) so I am going to keep this one a bit on the modest side and attempt to read 50 books. That should be doable as long as no major reading slumps happen again. Keeping my fingers crossed.

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I am joining in the Beat the Backlist challenge over at NovelKnight. I’ve done this one before with little success (much like the #StartOnYourShelfathon didn’t work out so well last year), but I’m going to try it again. I don’t think I want to set a specific TBR for this one. The main goal is to read older books that have been on your TBR – basically anything not published in the current year. I have a list on GoodReads of the books that I have, that I literally own, that I have not read and that list currently has . . . 147 books on it. Yeah. Those are mostly ebooks that I got for free from BookBub back when I still got their emails, but some are physical copies sitting on my shelves too. Beat the Backlist has something that is rather fun – a bingo card with prompts on it to help inspire your reading list for the year! Because of that, I am going to try and read 24 books off of my TBR, using these prompts as inspiration. Should be fun!

I might read more than the 24 books for this challenge. I might not. Anything to try and work down that list though! 

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It’s back! And boy, does it need to be! I have so many of these series that I just didn’t bother to finish. Which is sad, because I really enjoyed these books, at least enough for them to make it on this list (there have been a few series that I started that are not on this list because I didn’t have any interest in finishing them – it doesn’t happen often but it does occasionally).

The sad thing is that, after reviewing some of these, I only have one book left to finish the series in its entirety. That’s not the case with all of them, as some of them I’ve only read the first book and there are several more in the series. The other thing that makes this difficult is that because I read so much and because my brain can be flighty, I have to start re-reading the first books before I can get to the new ones because I can’t remember enough of the story to continue. 

So my goal for this year is to try and complete four series on this list. That should be simple to do (“should” being the key word). There are a few on here that are duologies, so I might start there to try and knock some of these out before moving on to longer series. I think the longest one on here is Yasmine Galenorn’s Otherworld series, which has 21 books according to GoodReads. I’ve read a fair few of them, but again, see my above comment on having to re-read stuff. Sigh.

Here is the master list of series in question: 

1. Fire and Thorns series by Rae Carson
2. The Seven Realms series by Cinda Williams Chima
3. Hellsbane series by Paige Cuccaro
4. Book of Ember series by Jeanne DuPrau
5. Exalted series by Tara Elizabeth
6. The Rules of Disappearing series by Ashley Elston
7. Otherworld series by Yasmine Galenorn
8. Scarlet series by A.C. Gaughen
9. Grimm series by Adam Gidwitz
10. Legends of Dimmingwood series by C. Greenwood
11. The Chameleon Effect series by Alex Hayes
12. The Spectral City series by Leanna Renee Hieber
13. Rain Wild Chronicles by Robin Hob
14. Mara Dyer series by Michelle Hodkin
15. Shades of London series by Maureen Johnson
16. Arrows trilogy by Mercedes Lackey
17. Five Hundred Kingdoms series by Mercedes Lackey
18. Starbound series by Amie Kauffman & Meagan Spooner
19. The Shadow Watch series by S.A. Klopfenstein
20. Sevenwaters trilogy by Juliet Marillier
21. The Marked series by March McCarron
    
22. Angelfire series by Courtney Allison Moulton
23. Abhorsen series by Garth Nix
24. Tremeraire series by Naomi Novik
25. War Girls series by Tochi Onyebuchi
26. The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice
27. The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
28. The Plantation series by Stella Samiotou-Fitzsimons
29. The Bone Charmer duology by Breeana Shields
30. Bartimaeus series by Jonathan Stroud
31. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
32. ISAN series by Mary Ting
33. Between series by April Genevieve Tulcholke
34. The Burning series by Evan Winter
35. Program series by Suzanne Young

I plan on starting with The Rules of Disappearing series/duology by Ashley Elston. The first book was a pretty quick read from what I remember.

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As far as general reading and blogging goals go, I plan to have at least four books as current reads at any given time: one for Beat the Backlist, one for Complete the Series, one for Mark Reads, and one for Nerdist Book Club. I will also try as hard as I can to complete any series that I start for the first time in 2021 so that I don’t add to the Complete the Series list any more than I have to. I will update everyone on my WWW posts as well as on review posts how the challenges are going.

Speaking of reviews, there will be a lot more of them than normal over the next few weeks. I am trying to get all the reviews for books I finished in 2020 up and posted so that I can have a mostly clean slate without a review backlog going into the current year.

My blogging schedule for the new year will be as follows:

• Mondays: Wake Up post or occasionally reviews
• Tuesdays: Teaser Tuesday and/or Top Ten Tuesday
• Wednesdays: WWW Wednesdays
• Thursdays: Reviews
• Fridays: Weekly-Wrap Up
• Saturdays: Nostalgic Reads

I’m hoping that I don’t hit a blogging slump either next year. I also really want to bring back Nostalgic Reads because those are super fun, although they take longer than most of my other posts.

I wish you all a happy and healthy New Year! Let’s hope the world is a brighter and kinder place in 2021!

Categories: Challenges

Tags: 2021, happy new year, reading challenges